Judges End Trump's "Capricious" Freeze of Billions for Green Projects

Good news for co-op and condo boards striving to wean their building systems from fossil fuels and power them with electricity from renewable sources. Two federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration over-reached when it tried to freeze funds for clean energy projects approved by Congress during the Biden administration.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy — an appointee of President Donald Trump — has issued a temporary injunction ordering five government agencies to release billions of dollars in funding for climate and infrastructure-related projects that had been paused by an executive order issued by Trump on his first day in office, The Washington Post reports.

In a separate but related case, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from “unlawfully suspending or terminating” $14 billion in climate grants approved under President Joe Biden. She also ordered Citibank, which was tasked with disbursing the funds, to release the money to the grant recipients. Commonly known as a “green bank,” the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund authorized tens of billions in grants for recipients to invest in green technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles and more.

Trump's EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, accused the Biden administration of “tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door.” The Justice Department and the FBI have also launched a criminal investigation into the green bank program, but the investigation has produced no evidence of wrongdoing. For his part, Trump has dismissed climate change as "a hoax."

Judge McElroy's temporary injunction was issued in response to a lawsuit filed by environmental nonprofit groups after the Trump administration froze funds approved by Congress under two Biden-era laws to fight climate change and improve infrastructure — the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

The lawsuit is one of many that were filed since Inauguration Day over the administration’s sweeping freeze on federal grants and loans.

Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal group that is representing the nonprofits, described the funding freeze as “another abuse of executive power that has already inflicted harm on communities nationwide.” The group said in a news release that Judge McElroy’s injunction secures the “largest release of this critical funding to date.”

And that's good news for co-op and condo boards seeking to cut their buildings' carbon emissions by installing solar panels, electric heat pumps and other green retrofits that would benefit from federal funding under the Biden-era laws. Trump's freeze had thrown many of those projects into doubt, or stopped them in their tracks. At least for now, the injunction keeps the money flowing.

“Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a President’s agenda," Judge McElroy wrote in her opinion, "nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration.”

She added that Trump's attempt to freeze funds approved by Congress was "arbitrary and capricious."